Water Rails & Oil - Historic Mid & South Jefferson County

family. The first celebration featured a train
ride to Port Neches and a picnic for all Port
Arthur children.
Port Neches also became the source of Port
Arthur’s fresh water. Water from two artesian
wells surged through eight miles of mains
constructed of redwood to Port Arthur to supply
1.3 million gallons daily. The wells were
purchased through a $460,000 bond issue, and
the project became operational on June 12,
1913. Additional development could be seen in
the introduction of a regular interurban rail line
between Port Arthur and Beaumont. By 1914
the volume of tonnage shipped through Port
Arthur raised it to the rank of fourteenth in the
nation. Its population had reached 12,600
people, served by a public library, electric and
gas utilities, two newspapers, a booming
petroleum business constantly in need of
labor—and unwarranted confidence that the
city enjoyed “absolute protection from damage
by Gulf Storms.”
Future hurricanes proved that assumption
fatally wrong, but in 1914 the immediate
“storm” came from across the Atlantic Ocean,
where German powers fought against Britain
and France. Each side had additional alliances,
so the Great War, the name for this confrontation
until after 1941, has been known since as
World War I. Europeans fought for three years,
1914-1917, before the United States joined
them as a belligerent against Germany, but
southern Jefferson County experienced the
effects of the war long before then. Additional
demand for petroleum products in Europe due
to war’s acceleration of consumption called for
increased production at area refineries and
additional shipping. Refineries in Jefferson
County produced more than one million gallons
of fuel weekly during the war.
Port Arthur citizens got to see some of the
consequences of war when the oil tanker
Gulflight steamed into their port in May 1915,
showing damage sustained in the Mediterranean
Sea from a German submarine. In 1917 a
German sub also took down the British steamer
Saxonian, filled with oil shipped from Port
Arthur. Sobered by the reality of war, Gulf
Refining, The Texas Company, and Port Arthur
Canal and Dock Company closed their facilities
to visitors and issued identification badges to
employees. With more than twenty-eight
hundred people working the Gulf refinery
alone, this proved quite a change and a task.
Preparation for the war, declared by Congress in
April 1917, included the organization of
❖
Alfred Small minding the store with
the help of his first grandson, Howard
Dean Smith, in this family-owned
store on Port Arthur’s West side. Also
in the photo on the left are Logan
Smith and Leroy Smith.
COURTESY OF THE MUSEUM OF THE GULF COAST,
PORT ARTHUR, TEXAS.
Chapter III ✦ 29